Desertification In The Deserts Of The World

2. Introduction

2.1 General Explanation

The deserts of the world take approximately 206,550,000 km² of the world’s land mass. That means that about 40.5% of the world’s mainland region is covered with a climate that has a high evaporation. As a result of limited rainfall, the wind conditions and temperature can cause specific regions to be severely dry (6). The people in these places are under the constant fear of dying because of desertification. All together, over 3.6 B hectares, which is about the surface of North – and South-America, is threatened by desertification (4). This concerns over 100 countries and 1 B people. Each year 27,000,000 hectare of land get turn into desert. The result is a yearly loss of income of about $42 B. A stop or at least a deceleration should be possible because desertification is cause by human activity or passivity.

2.2 Common Definition of the term “Desertification”

In 1949 the word “Desertification” was used first by the French botanist André Aubréville in his publication “Climats, forêts et desertification de l’Afrique tropicale” (Climate, forests and desertification of the tropical Africa) (2). Ever since the founding of the UNESCO Arid Zone program in 1952, the United Nations spent a big part of their attention on the dry zones of the earth. Since the 1970’s people are talking about the local or regional extension of desert areas. People now know that the humanity is the problem. Meanwhile, desertification is viewed as one of the biggest environmental problems of the last 30 years, and a lot of research and science is based on desertification or related topics. There are over a hundred different designations for desertification. It always depends on which co...

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...ng does not always work, because there are conflicts in some regions of the world or it’s just a lack of financing or political interest. All in all there are many more methods to prevent or stop desertification.

6. Recent incidents

Europe actually recently had a surprising visit of a Sahara dust storm. People in the United Kingdom and in Germany said that they saw orange – yellow clouds over the skies. Costumers of solar generated power were talking about having no power from the sun, because sand storms covered it up. At the time scientists do not see an impact on the life in Western Europe, but this case is an interesting example of how the winds can drag the desert sand over thousands of kilometers. Due to the climate change and the global warming, it might soon be reality to have drylands and deserts in Italy and southern Germany as well (8).